Deepfakes: You Can't Believe Your Eyes
Winter – Wk 12: MetaHuman Creator lets any dummy create deepfakes for fun. Before long, only a fool will believe anything he sees online.
My latest: “MetaHuman Creator Will Put Deepfakes in the Hands of the People” — in the Federalist
The creation process begins with a generic face that’s molded like mortal clay. The results are truly remarkable. Unreal Engine explains in a news release: “MetaHuman Creator…works by drawing from an ever-growing library of variants of human appearance and motion, and enabling you to create convincing new characters through intuitive workflows.”
You can make your digital humans fat or skinny, tow-headed or bald, hot or homely. You can give them a button nose or a big ol’ honker. You can place them anywhere on the gender spectrum, dress them up like digital dolls, and make them say whatever you like.
Ultimately, this software will democratize deepfakes. It starts with innocent pranks, and ends in international scandals. As the fakes pile up, normal people will increasingly approach media with schizoid skepticism—a trend well underway. Any video evidence a person wants to ignore can be dismissed as a “deepfake.”
Read the rest here.
Vindicated two days after this article published (3/2/21), when the media took notice of a viral Tom Cruise deepfake that apparently fooled the more gullible half of the world on TikTok.
Un-fucking-believable.